15 Famous Songs With Misunderstood Meanings

Here's a look at some songs that got their meanings twisted and misconstrued—and the original intentions put forth by the artists who wrote them.

1. "Closing Time" // Semisonic

Semisonic frontman Dan Wilson predicted the second life of the band's only big hit; in 2010, Wilson told The Hollywood Reporter, "I really thought that that was the greatest destiny for 'Closing Time,' that it would be used by all the bartenders." But when Wilson penned lyrics like "Time for you to go out to the places you will be from," the song's focus was more an emphasis on the miracle of childbirth than an ode to kicking late-night barflies to the curb.

In 2010, Wilson admitted to American Songwriter that he had babies on his mind partway through writing Semisonic's gangbuster breakout hit, stating, "My wife and I were expecting our first kid very soon after I wrote that song. I had birth on the brain, I was struck by what a funny pun it was to be bounced from the womb."

2. "Imagine" // John Lennon

When Rolling Stone named the former Beatle's ubiquitous hit the third greatest song of all time, Lennon's hallmark lyrics were described as "22 lines of graceful, plain-spoken faith in the power of a world, united in purpose, to repair and change itself." But the feel-good sentiments behind the song Jimmy Carter once said was "used almost equally with national anthems" have some serious Communist underpinnings.

Lennon called the song "virtually the Communist manifesto," and once the song became a hit, went on record saying, "Because it's sugarcoated it's accepted. Now I understand what you have to do—put your message across with a little honey."

3. "Total Eclipse of the Heart" // Bonnie Tyler

"Total Eclipse of the Heart" is the kind of big, bombastic power ballad that could only flow from the pen of frequent Meat Loaf collaborator Jim Steinman; he called the number a "Wagnerian-like onslaught of sound and emotion" in an interview with People, and American Songwriter's Jim Beviglia christened it a "garment-rending, chest-beating, emotionally exhausting ballad." It's also a vampire love song.

When Steinman featured "Total Eclipse" in his Broadway musical Dance of the Vampires—a flop that lost $12 million—in 2002, he opened up about the song to Playbill, stating, "With 'Total Eclipse of the Heart,' I was trying to come up with a love song and I remembered I actually wrote that to be a vampire love song. Its original title was 'Vampires in Love' because I was working on a musical of Nosferatu, the other great vampire story. If anyone listens to the lyrics, they're really like vampire lines. It's all about the darkness, the power of darkness and love's place in dark."

The only thing that might be more oblique than the lyrics to what Smith told Blender is "the best pop song The Cure have ever done" is Smith's explanation for the love song's cryptically esoteric poetry. In the same 2003 interview with Blender, Smith said "Just Like Heaven," inspired by a trip with his girlfriend to Beachy Head in southern England, was "about hyperventilating—kissing and falling to the floor."

Smith's dissection of the song's opening lines ("Show me, show me, show me how you do that trick") is less obvious. According to the singer, the line is equal parts a reference to his affinity for performing magic tricks in his youth and "about a seduction trick, from much later in my life."

5. "Like a Virgin" // Madonna

Turns out Mr. Brown (who thinks "Like a Virgin" is "a metaphor for big d**ks") and Mr. Blonde ("It's about a girl who is very vulnerable") both misinterpreted Madonna's smash hit in the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs. Even though Madonna famously settled the fictional debate by autographing a CD for Quentin Tarantino—"Quentin, it's about love, not d**k"—"Like a Virgin" is only autobiographical for songwriter Billy Steinberg.

Not originally meant for a female performer, the lyrics Steinberg penned for "Like a Virgin" tackle his own relationship woes. He explained in depth to the Los Angeles Times: "I was saying... that I may not really be a virgin—I've been battered romantically and emotionally like many people—but I'm starting a new relationship and it just feels so good, it's healing all the wounds and making me feel like I've never done this before, because it's so much deeper and more profound than anything I've ever felt."

6. "Harder to Breathe" // Maroon 5

At first blush, the single off Maroon 5 debut album Songs About Jane seems to be, well, just another song about Jane, the name of a girlfriend with whom lead singer Adam Levine shared a rocky relationship. But though the album's lead-off single sounds like a racy nod to the jilted lover Levine claimed to be his muse, "Harder to Breathe" stemmed from a different kind of suffocating relationship. The song serves as a bitter indictment of music industry pressures.

Said Levine in a 2002 interview with MTV: “That song comes sheerly from wanting to throw something. It was the 11th hour, and the label wanted more songs. It was the last crack. I was just pissed. I wanted to make a record and the label was applying a lot of pressure, but I’m glad they did.”

7. "Summer of '69" // Bryan Adams

Born in the winter of 1959, Bryan Adams would've only been 10 during the eponymous summer of one of his best-known hits, released in 1985. But "Summer of '69" isn't so much Adams waxing nostalgic over the dog days of 1969 as much as it is a reference to the sexual position of the same name. In 2008, Adams told CBS News that "a lot of people think it's about the year, but actually it's more about making love in the summertime. It's using '69 as a sexual reference."

Parts of the song are still steeped in hints of truth, though: Adams has gone on record saying that he picked up his second-ever electric guitar at a pawn shop, and that his fingers indeed bled while he was "totally submersed in practicing." Other facts are indisputably wrong; Adams' first band, Shock, formed when the singer was 16, and "Summer of '69" co-writer Jim Vallance stands by the song as a wistful trip in the wayback machine.

8. "The One I Love" // R.E.M.

When the Georgia natives unleashed their first Top-10 single in concert, R.E.M. guitar-slinger Peter Buck felt baffled by audiences' romantic reactions. Said Buck: "I'd look into the audience and there would be couples kissing. Yet the verse is ... savagely anti-love ... People told me that was 'their song.' That was your song?"

9. "Semi-Charmed Life" // Third Eye Blind

Radio purists of the '90s probably missed out on the fact that the upbeat Third Eye Blind anthem is about a couple on a crystal meth binge—the two censor-triggering words in the line "doing crystal meth will lift you up until you break" would get backmasked in an edited version of the song played by radio stations.

Why make a song about such a serious topic so light and bouncy? Lead singer Stephen Jenkins explained that the musical and lyrical juxtapositions were completely intentional: The music reflects "the bright, shiny feeling you get on speed," he told Billboard.

10. "American Girl" // Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Sorry, urban legend enthusiasts. Tom Petty's 1977 standard wasn't inspired by a University of Florida girl who committed suicide by jumping from a Beaty Towers balcony. Though the song's second verse references both a girl standing "alone on her balcony" and "could hear the cars roll by out on 441" (a highway that runs near the Gainesville campus), Petty has shot down the misunderstanding on numerous occasions.

In the book Conversations With Tom Petty, the lead Heartbreaker is quoted as saying, "It's become a huge urban myth down in Florida. That's just not at all true. The song has nothing to do with that. But that story really gets around." Heartbreakers' guitarist Mike Campbell has backed Petty up, stating that some interpretations of the song took the lyrics at face value: "Some people take it literally and out of context. To me it's just a really beautiful love song."

11. "In the Air Tonight" // Phil Collins

In Round Two of Song Meanings Getting Twisted By Urban Legends, Phil Collins' first solo single wasn't written about the singer's brush with a man who refused point-blank to save a drowning swimmer. And, according to Collins himself, he most definitely didn't invite the man to stand front row in the concert to be verbally berated by "In the Air Tonight."

Instead, the song is simply a tense, introspective look at Collins' divorce from his first wife. Collins swears by the story that he pulled together the lyrics in a snap during a studio recording session, and laughs off the rumors swirling around the origins of "In the Air Tonight." He admitted to the BBC that he doesn't know what the heck the song is actually about, saying, "What makes it even more comical is when I hear these stories which started many years ago, particularly in America, of someone come up to me and say, ‘Did you really see someone drowning?’ I said, ‘No, wrong’ ... This is one song out of all the songs probably that I’ve ever written that I really don’t know what it’s about...”

12. "London Calling" // The Clash

At its heart, one of The Clash's most scathing political statements is less a song about the state of British politics and more a song about Joe Strummer's personal fear of drowning. In a dissection of "London Calling" published by the Wall Street Journal, Mick Jones mentioned the band's nervousness regarding a 1979 London Evening Standard headline about the possibility of the Thames River overflowing and flooding London. How did The Clash react to the news? According to Jones, "We flipped."

That nagging fear of drowning propelled Strummer's first few drafts of the song's lyrics, at least until Jones stepped in to broaden the scope until "the song became this warning about the doom of everyday life." Joked Jones about the band's sink-or-swim anxiety: "We were a bit ahead of the global warming thing, weren't we?"

13. "Blackbird" // The Beatles

A highlight from the McCartney songbook (and written at his kitchen table in Scotland), Sir Paul penned "Blackbird" about the American Civil Rights Movement, drawing inspiration from the racial desegregation of the Little Rock, Arkansas school system. Put succinctly by USA Today, "Paul McCartney penned Blackbird about the black struggle."

In a 2008 interview with Mojo, McCartney elaborated on just how enamored The Beatles were with the Civil Rights Movement happening across the pond. "I got the idea of using a blackbird as a symbol for a black person. It wasn't necessarily a black 'bird', but it works that way, as much as then you called girls 'birds' ... it wasn't exactly an ornithology ditty; it was purely symbolic."

Not that the misinterpretation of the ballad as a high school slow dance number fazes Armstrong. As he told VHI's Behind the Music, "I sort of enjoy the fact that I'm misunderstood most of the time. That's fine."

15. "Born in the USA" // Bruce Springsteen

No list of misunderstood songs is complete without "Born in the U.S.A." Music critic Greil Marcus believes the use of The Boss's hit as a rah-rah political anthem fuels its legacy: "Clearly the key to Bruce's popularity is in a misunderstanding. He is a tribute to the fact that people hear what they want to hear."

As Songfacts points out, "Most people thought it was a patriotic song about American pride, when it actually cast a shameful eye on how America treated its Vietnam veterans ... with the rollicking rhythm, enthusiastic chorus, and patriotic album cover, it is easy to think this has more to do with American pride than Vietnam shame."

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